Page 60 of Flirting with Forever

Mertons paced his small room, furious. He’d been banging and shouting for half an hour, but the room was in the lowest floor of the house, and if anyone heard they remained unmoved.

The cunning fox was probably plying Peter with her wares now. If Peter were not smart enough to see a trap when it was laid for him, surely he wouldn’t divulge an iota of information on Van Dyck, not when the sole purpose of their trip here had been to save that idiot’s reputation.

The lock turned and Mertons started. It was an apprentice from Stephen’s troop of apes, though this time, one smaller than a barn, which gave him hope.

“Master wants to see you. Says it’s urgent.”

“I should think so.”

Mertons took the stairs two at a time and pelted down the hall. He listened for the signs that the woman had been subdued but heard nothing. The thought of a gag brought a small smile to his face.

The office was empty, and Mertons was just about to try the studio when the side door banged open and Peter, wearing a rumpled shirt and a stormy, unrested face, flung a canvas so hard into a scrap box that he knocked the container several feet across the room.

“What on earth…?”

Peter silenced him with a molten glare, collapsed into his seat, and dropped his head in his hands.

“The deed is done. Take me back.”

Twenty-three

Cam typed quickly, despite occasional breaks to wait out a spell of Jeanne resettling herself with a sleepy sigh on the long office couch or to wipe the lens of wetness from her eyes. She’d been working hard since she’d arrived back in the twenty-first century a few hours earlier, and she wasn’t going to stop until she was done—especially because stopping meant she’d have more time to think, and thinking was the last thing she wanted to do after leaving Peter’s bed with her tail between her legs.

At least she had gotten a story angle—a great story angle, she might add. Peter had told her about the affair Van Dyck, the old lech, had had with a young girl named Agnes. Giselle, it turned, had been a nonstarter. Nothing but a seventeenth-century stalker. Apparently even painters had those.

Agnes, on the other hand, was a girl who had been identified by Van Dyck early in her young life as a potential wife. Van Dyck had supplied the abbess of the orphanage where Agnes lived with enough money to sponsor the girl’s education and to ensure she would never be exposed to anything that might awaken her sexual curiosity. Van Dyck, it seemed, had an unearthly fear of being cuckolded—the hobgoblin of men with small minds and even smaller penises—and wanted his future wife to be entirely devoted to him.

Naturally when she emerged from the orphanage as a young woman, Agnes promptly fell in love with a man her own age—Cam had a sneaking suspicion this was Peter, though he referred to the young man as Horace—and Van Dyck laid traps to try to catch them in the act.

It was a fantastic triangle. Plenty of sex. Plenty of behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Now all she had to do was fit it into her biography, send it to her publisher again, and she’d have Ball’s gift of the $2.1 million Van Dyck painting as well as a book deal to lay before the museum board. She thought of the scene in Flashdance, a scene actually filmed in the Carnegie’s great hall, where Jennifer Beals points a victorious finger at every sour-faced judge during her dance audition and wins them over to her obvious suitability.

Yep, she thought as the scene played in her head, that would be her, though there would be no Michael Nouri waiting with a bunch of roses at the end, and there would certainly be no Jake Ryan sitting on top of his Porsche, making sure she celebrated her big day in the best way possible.

Peter had retreated into a polite reserve. He told her the Van Dyck story without emotion, answering whatever questions she asked, before excusing himself, saying he had an appointment he’d forgotten. He had not asked her to stay. He had not asked her to schedule another sitting. He did not mention another Wednesday afternoon. She’d simply gathered her purse, stumbled down the stairs with a general murmur about the privy, and walked to the models’ room. Within a minute, she’d called up Amazon on her phone as Jeanne had suggested, replayed the steps she’d taken before, and been deposited with a bang at her desk.

Her main problem was that a biography, at least in theory, was supposed to be based on facts. The Agnes story was a fact, but Cam could hardly footnote it with “From an interview with Van Dyck contemporary Peter Lely, November 5, 1673.” She’d need to find some mention of it somewhere in the records.

Jeanne stirred. “Mmmgph. Are you still up?”

“Yeah. Thanks for staying.”

“You know I like to rack up as much overtime as possible. Besides, the only way I could explain my panic about your absence earlier was saying you’d found a vein of gold, research-wise, and had rushed off to the library without telling anyone.”

“I take it you didn’t mention the explosion and the orange Crush?”

“Do I look like I want to be carted away by men in white coats? I said I’d heard a noise in your office and that when I went in you were gone.”

“You should be a writer.”

“Tell me about it. I’m glad the reverse trip worked, though. You didn’t come back right away, so I wasn’t sure.”

Cam thought about how much smarter it would have been if she had. She hadn’t told Jeanne anything that had happened after her ill-conceived posing.

“I’m having a problem.”

“Hit me.” Jeanne sat up and rubbed her eyes.

“This story about the virgin Agnes is great stuff, but I’m supposed to be an academic. What am I going to list as a source on that?”